Threats Force Hollywood Cemetery to Remove Confederate Memorial

Twitter/ScreenshotJOEL B. POLLAK16 Aug 2017

The Hollywood Forever Cemetery will remove a memorial to Confederate veterans buried at the site, thanks in part to threats of vandalism, as well as requests from activists, according to a Tuesday report in the Los Angeles Times.

The Timesnotes that the granite monument marking the burial site was already vandalized on Tuesday:

Since 1925, the 6-foot monument has stood in the Confederate section of the cemetery, where more than 30 Confederate veterans, along with their families, are buried. The monument will be taken to a storage site within the next 24 hours, cemetery officials said, but the grave markers will remain.

This week, Hollywood Forever was fielding as many as 60 calls and emails a day from people requesting the cemetery get rid of the monument, said Tyler Cassity, the cemetery’s president and co-owner. A Change.org petition calling for its removal drew more than 1,300 signatures.

On Tuesday, someone vandalized the granite boulder monument, Cassity said, using a black marker to write “No” across its bronze plaque.

The memorial is actually owned by the Long Beach chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The cemetery director reached out to them, according to the Times, and they agreed to take the monument down.

The monument was largely unknown until the Timespublished an op-ed last week, “Los Angeles has a Confederate memorial problem.” The author actually argued for the memorial to remain, as a reminder that California did not escape the racial problems of the past: “This western memorial, however, will likely endure — as well it should. It serves as a needed corrective to a self-congratulatory strain in the stories Californians tell about themselves.”

The attack on all symbols of the Confederacy is not limited to gravesites in Hollywood. Activists have also demanded that HBO cancel an upcoming series by the creators of the hit Game of Thrones franchise that imagines what America would have been like if the Confederacy had won the Civil War.